In Transit

In Dubai Airport waiting for my flight to Colombo. I really want to sleep, but am afraid to go to sleep in case I don't wake up and miss my flight. The endless flight announcements don't really provide a conducive environment for sleep anyway. I'm not quite sure why constant announcements are needed.

I came pretty close to missing my flight from Wien as the train from Pardubice was 45 minutes late. Originally I was going to catch an early morning train, but as I didn't really feel like hanging around in Wien I caught a later train, which should have got me into Wien with plenty of time to spare to catch a bus out to the airport. As it was I got to the airport about an hour before the scheduled departure time of my flight, so I was OK. If the train had been any later though. I would have been in trouble!

Yesterday Jiří took me to Opočno, which has a beautiful renaissance chateau. The chateau was closed, but we had a stroll in the gardens and a wander around the town. We ended up having lunch in Hradec Králové as Jiří had to buy some stuff for his house and on the way home stopped off in another town, where we ended up having another stroll in the grounds of an old chateau. It was perfect strolling weather yesterday - the kind of weather where you want to spend all day lying on the grass in a park.

Jiří had invited Tomáš and Jana over for dinner, so I cooked some Sri Lankan food for them. The rice was a dismal failure as I'm used to a rice cooker and couldn't quite get the hang of Jiří's fancy stove, but the other dishes weren't too bad. Jiří admitted that he's not much of a cook, but he made an excellent assistant!

Sitting here in Dubai airport I can't quite believe that yesterday morning I was in Vamberk having breakfast with Jiří - or that this afternoon I'll be back in Kandy! Maggie arrives a few hours after me, so I'm going to wait for her and catch a taxi back to Kandy. Because of the New Year buses will be few and far between, so we've already arranged for a driver to meet us at the airport.

My battery is getting low, so I should finish what I'm writing. I need to find which gate my flight is leaving from anyway. The new terminal is huge and it's quite a distance between gates.